Sunday Mailbag- Digital or Traditional?

Q: Hey Tom, What kind of art tools do you use for your work? Are you 100% digital or do you use any traditional media?

Note: This was actually a question asked for our “Ask Des & Tom!” feature on our CLAPTRAP Indiegogo page, but I thought it would be good to also answer here. Before I answer this, if you are expecting a debate about which is better, traditional art or digital art, you are about to be disappointed. Neither is better or worse than the other, they are simply both tools for creating. Now, on to the answer:

A: Ah. The age old question… “What _______ do you use?”. That’s the artist’s equivalent of the writer’s “Where do you get your ideas?” question… except our’s has an actual answer!

I actually have my feet planted in both the traditional and digital worlds.

I start out on the digital side, doing all my rough sketches and compositions on a Wacom Cintiq tablet, usually right on the layouts of whatever piece I am working on. In the case of our CLAPTRAP spoofs, that would be the “mechanicals” with the word boxes and title graphics in place. Here’s an example:

Once the pages are composed and fleshed out a bit, I print them out on paper (at 200% of print size for the parody work) and then use a light table to transfer them to Bristol board. I usually use a 400 or 500 series 3 ply Strathmore board… it depends what I have in the drawer or what was available the last time I ordered some boards. I prefer the vellum aka “cold press” (rougher) surface.

Then I really dig in to the drawing. I usually use an HB .5 mechanical pencil for this because I don’t really want to make the quality of the pencil lines become something I get distracted by. That’s for the inks.

Once the final pencils are done it’s ink time! I use Pelikan’s Drawing Ink A for most of my inking and Dr. Martin’s Black Star Matte ink for pick brushwork. I ink about 90% of my pages with a regular old Hunt 102 crow quill pen nib but I also sometimes use a Gillott 303 or a Zebra Comic G nib, which is a new one I kind of like. For brushes I like real red sable. The Windsor Newton Series 7 #2 and #4 are ones I use the most often, and I’ll use a #8 for the big areas that need covering. Here’s the inks:

Once the inks are done I scan them in and it’s back to the computer. I do all my coloring in PhotoShop. My current setup is an iMac Pro with a Wacom Cintiq Pro 32 pen display. I do not use any fancy brushes. Mostly just “hard rounds” of varying sizes but I make extensive use the pen sensitivity of the Cintiq for both brush size and opacity to create “wash” like effects. The lines stay on their own layer and I color “under” them on another layer. Here’s the color final:

I use variations of that process for almost all the illustration work I do. BTW here’s the full splash page for this parody again:

Thanks to R Griffin for the question. If you have a question you want answered for the mailbag about  cartooning, illustration, MAD Magazine, caricature or similar, e-mail me and I’ll try and answer it here!